My new hero
OK, this is a little slow on the uptake, but it's my civic duty at this point to make sure everyone's seen Stephen Colbert's stunning performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner from last weekend. I thought Colbert's show started off a little weak, but once he got the character down - Bill O'Reilly drawn in broad strokes - it became a hilarious sarcastic overview about how morons and Washington Republicans view politics.
The White House Correspondents Dinner almost always brings in comedians to keynote; Al Franken devotes a chapter of Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot to how well he did there in the mid-90s. Colbert's brilliance, though, was that he declined to base his routine on the "hey, I'm an insider too, isn't Tom DeLay funny" schtick that everyone else uses. Colbert stayed in character: a pompous asshole who believes everything the president says because that's what good Washington insiders do. I mean, obviously he was criticizing the president. But a Salon article I read puts it best:
It's not just that Colbert's jokes were hitting their mark. We already know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the generals hate Rumsfeld or that Fox News lists to the right. Those cracks are old and boring. What Colbert did was expose the whole official, patriotic, right-wing, press-bashing discourse as a sham, as more "truthiness" than truth.
...
So it's no wonder that those journalists at the dinner seemed so uneasy in their seats. They had put on their tuxes to rub shoulders with the president. They were looking forward to spotting Valerie Plame and "American Idol's" Ace Young at the Bloomberg party. They invited Colbert to speak for levity, not because they wanted to be criticized. As a tribe, we journalists are all, at heart, creatures of this silly conversation. We trade in talking points and consultant-speak. We too often depend on empty language for our daily bread, and -- worse -- we sometimes mistake it for reality. Colbert was attacking us as well.
That's one reason I recommend watching the video of this: not just the president's increasingly irritated reaction from three feet away, but the way the press members in the audience stopped laughing about five minutes in. It's flat-out gold to watch. The jokes make more sense too.
Of course, it's a mistake to think that Colbert just went after Bush because he's a liberal guy. What most of the Washington insider crowd continues to miss is that the Daily Show crowd isn't criticizing their politics so much as how awful the political-media insider conglomerate has become. (I know, it's always been bad, but bear with me.) I'll admit to being as surprised as anyone as when Jon Stewart took his appearance on Crossfire as a chance to go after the scream-fest talk show practitioners to their faces, but after that it should have been apparent to everyone involved that the raison d'etre behind the Daily Show is the entire political process deserves complete and total mockery. I have never seen anyone do that so effectively as Stephen Colbert. I think he just made himself a star.